THE EIDOLON.

Otago Witness, Issue 3250, 28 June 1916, Page 65

THE EIDOLON.

By Jessie Mackay.

If in these days of dire happenings a pressed slave of the inkpot sends up an article badly headed "Dolls," there are moralists who might complain, and not even the classic if battered figure of ' Mr Dolls" in "Our Mutual Friend" could be dragged in as a mollifier of philosophic disapproval. Is it justifiable, then, to take the popular eve with the mystic beauty of "eidolon,"' which for most has no other connection but that given by Edgar Allan Toe, to whom an " eidolon named Night " brought the world-famed vision of°the Raven. But here at once the philologists take a hand and wage a wordy war on the question of derivation. For the older-fashioned delver amid the roots of speech taught that " doll " was taken from " Dorothy," a common name in Britain long ago, as it is to-day, and in support of this it appears that the word "doll " was not in use further back than three or four centuries. But the more impressive and, one fancies, more modern theory derives " doll " from " idol," and that from " eidolon," Greek for image, phantom or apparition. Thus we have our "eidolon" in both its concrete and its abstract phases, with a permeating idea of the mystic, the hierarchic, and the therapeutic. For the Image has ever been a matter of import to the human mind, whether as a shadowing forth of the unseen, as a remembrancer of holy things, or as a.vehicle for superstition to work upon, whether to kill or cure. " What did you with your waxen man, sister Helen?" asks the little brother of Rossetti's implacable heroine, who has melted her faithless lover's image daily at a wasting flame that fiery pain and mortal weakness should be his doom. And in the same beneficent mediasvaiism centred prayer and ceremony round a tiny efligy of the loved sufferer; both the curse and the cure, when known or suspected, playing a tremendous part in healing and sickness. Titus far one has meandered before remarking that the whole eidolon idea has just fallen out of an American exchange in an up-to-date announcement of a doll show lately held at the National Convention of Women's Clubs in New York. The club ladies have not taken to dolls as a pastime, but were organising this exhibition to show the changes in women's dress during the last 16 centuries, and the show fitted in with a lecture by Mrs Charles H. Wright, of Massachusetts, an expert on historical costume. Certainly the most oblivious of blue-stockings could not but wake up to an interest in the fashions of Britain in the time of Constantino's mother, good St. Helena, before she had started on her belated travels in the Holy Land in her latter seventies. And certainly there are many of us who would like to see the presentment of a French lady of fashion in the year 800, that saw Charlemagne assume the crown as the first potentate of the Holy Roman Empire. Doubtless that same lady would have been powerfully impressed could she have known that the rude war camps of St. Genevieve .were one day to become the shrine of fashion and the mould of beauty and desire in dress. And we would like to see that Byzantine lady of 900, wnen the languorous, brilliant culture of the East had invested the capital of Constantino on the Boephorus, strangling all that was manly and simple out of the old Hellenic schools of art and thought on which that Byzantine culture professed to be based. The witching wimples, the turreted headdresses, the flowing or tight-laced robes of mediasval queens and ladies—all these would give zest to a chronicle of fashion; and one does not doubt the exhibition drew the clubwomen as honey draws flies. But after all, in the history of dolls as dolls, Constantine's mother is but a modern circumstance, as indeed is that lovely institution of Japan, the Feast of Dolls, which is the high and holy day of the Mikado's girl subjects. Dolls have been found amid the oldest remains of historic peoples, and, indeed, on that borderline where history melts into the unknown past. They have been found in Egyptian tombs of 3000 or 4000 years ago, these tiny black objects bringing to our latter daylight a waft of old-time love and sorrow—those little figures that were the joy of some dead child of a mighty Pharaoh. The ancient civilisations of Asia Minor, long before lonian Empirebridged the seas between Greece and the Troad, show remains of the same sort, as do Greece and Rome themselves. And they kept their dolls long, these Roman maids, since it was a custom to vow the discarded images to Venus on their wedding day. And there can bo few more touching and essentially holy relics in the Vatican than the dolls once found in the catacombs. Into those dark galleries of refuge did the children of the Early Christians carry the little favourites that were banned the living day along with their baby owners. Nor did the Mohammedan restriction on image-making (allied to our own second commandment, which the Hebrews carried to such a stern conclusion) do away wholly with dolls amid the Arabs and other Moslem peoples. It is recorded that Mahomet himself was induced to toy with the dolls of his childbride, Ayesha. Africa has been a great doll continent. Not only did the civilised Egyptians cherish them ; but among the wild tribes of the interior they play a part which is more than mere pastime. The same ceremonial significance is suspected in many a case amid the primitive races in far-sundered countries. Little images are found among the Australian aborigines, among the natives of Alaska and the Red Indians of the south. The Aztecs, grim warriors though they were, seem to havo possessed a comprehensive doll ceremony of their own, since Cortes found the stately Montezuma and his courtiers playing with them, and less elaborate figures are dug up from the most ancient Peruvian graves.

Asia is less prolific in doll remains than Africa or America; but Malaya, Persia, and South India have them, and all in touch with mission work remember the pathetic affection of the Hindu girls for the European dolls, which are the most preciour prizes the mission schools can offer.

Whatever toy may go the way of the dodo it will never 'be the doll. As the new conceptions of infant psychology and pedagogy take firmer shape, the gentle part played by the doll in bringing out the kindly mother-instincts of girlhood will not be slighted. And when the mimic cannon and pistol have gone the way of all archaic evil things, will the finger of scorn be pointed at the boy who is caught nursing his sister's dolls? Or will the dawning cult of the New Fatherhood not find a new place for the little eidolon of peace and kindly affection that has been the joy of girlhood for so many millenniums ?